How to remove a thin site penalty
-
Wondering if anyone could help out. A while back I made an affiliate store using wordpress and merchants products feeds. I didn't get found to adding any unique content to the site and, as was to be expected, I gained a penalty and my search traffic died.
A few months back I redesigned the store, still using merchant csv but now with 98% unique content on each page. However, try as I may I still cannot get anywhere in the engines. The domain doesn't even rank for it's own name!! I have submitted reconsideration request but they have replied saying no penalty on the site.
The domain is www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk. While the domain isn't massively strong I would prefer not to have to start again as I feel it is a very good domain name.
Any advise would be most gratefully received.
Thanks
Carl
-
Thanks for your help gents'. All the content on the site was meant to be 100% unique (I got someone in my company to create with the help of external suppliers). I checked samples and they seemed fine but it appears that all isn't what it first appeared.
I'll get the content replaced and get back to it.
Thanks
-
Content of your website still bears some similarities with some external websites - http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/store/product/lady-loose-coat/ - content of this page bears some similarities with the following URL - http://goarticles.com/article/Fashion-Advice-You-Shouldn-t-Pass-Up-On/6997768/
H 1 tag is wrongly implemented –
_All the internal pagination series have duplicate content:
http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/category/968016/sandals-flat/2
http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/category/968016/sandals-flat/148
http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/category/968016/sandals-flat/147 `__Suggest removing the content from all pagination series. _
-
Yes unoriginal content will get you penalised very quick. Even if it's your content, if another site steals it and they have more authority google will most likely penalise you for it. Great to be given the benefit of the doubt isn't it? So clear that up but contacting other webmasters to have them remove it, or simply rewrite your content. After you are happy, resubmit your sitemap and update it if necessary before you do.
-
I am copying sentences from your site and putting them into Google and it looks like other websites have that sentence. So from my viewpoint, there looks to be some "unoriginal" content.
I don't really know how Google handles affiliate site. I know that they got blasted a few years ago for spamming. Your site is clearly an affiliate website.
Here is an example of what I see:
http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/store/product/leopard-print-bra-straps/
You are copying this. If you have this too much thoughout your site, why should you rank? I just looked at one page, I'm sure Google can find many more with their crawlers.
-
Hi
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I originally started to rebuild using Magento but swapped to Wordpress as it as quicker and easier. I see your thinking behind removing spam links but I'm convinced that the penalty is more for thin/duplicate content than a dodgy link profile. All the product feeds are identical to merchants as it's an affiliate store and previously these were the only content on the site. There is now lots of unique content on there with these feeds but I think I am still being treated as if it were duplicate
-
If the Google Police are saying there is no penalty on the site, then it's not a manual penalty. To me it sounds like an algorithmic penalty. Go through your links in GWT and try to remove the spam links. I love SEOmoz's OSE to see links, but look at GWT instead because their index is bigger and that's what Google sees.
You need to remove the links that are penalizing your site. Read Ryan Kent's post on link penalty removals: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012
Weird, you have Magento as your index, but WordPress too?
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why google does not remove my page?
Hi everyone, last week i add "Noindex" tag into my page, but that site still appear in the organic search. what other things i can do for remove from google?
Technical SEO | | Jorge_HDI0 -
Moving site from html to Wordpress site: Should I port all old pages and redirect?
Any help would be appreciated. I am porting an old legacy .html site, which has about 500,000 visitors/month and over 10,000 pages to a new custom Wordpress site with a responsive design (long overdue, of course) that has been written and only needs a few finishing touches, and which includes many database features to generate new pages that did not previously exist. My questions are: Should I bother to port over older pages that are "thin" and have no incoming links, such that reworking them would take time away from the need to port quickly? I will be restructuring the legacy URLs to be lean and clean, so 301 redirects will be necessary. I know that there will be link juice loss, but how long does it usually take for the redirects to "take hold?" I will be moving to https at the same time to avoid yet another porting issue. Many thanks for any advice and opinions as I embark on this massive data entry project.
Technical SEO | | gheh20130 -
Nofollow links on our site menu
Hi Our site's front page has almost 900 internal links on it (it's an ecommerce site with about 25,000 products). A lot of these are on a pretty involved dropdown menu, which is on every page. I can't really do anything to get this figure down (its outside my remit), but one thing the developers have done is make all the menu links nofollow on the mobile version of the menu (site is responsive) - otherwise there would be even more links! My question is as to whether doing this for the mobile menu is a good idea, in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | abisti21 -
Removing extension
Hi there, I have thousands of pages that use the extension .php and thought about cleaning these URLs up for example rather than www.mysite.com/trainers/adidias/samba.php I could have have www.mysite.com/trainers/adidas/samba/ is it worth changing? Currently driving around 1 million visits to the website each month from organic search and slightly concerned it could have a negative impact on my rankings. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | Paul780 -
Remove Site from Google
How can I get my website out of google? I want all pages completely gone. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Redirecting a old aged site to a new exact match site?
Hi All, I have a question. I have 2 sites with me in the same sector and want some help. site 1 is a old site started back in 2003 and has some amount of links to it and has a pr 3 with some good links to it but doesn't rank much for any keywords for the timing. site 2 is a aged domain but newly developed with unique content and has a good amount of exact match with a .com version. so will there be any benefit by redirecting site 1 to site 2 to get the seo benefits and a start for link bulding? or is it best to develop and work on each site? the sector is health insurance. Thanks
Technical SEO | | macky71 -
How a google bot sees your site
So I have stumbled across various websites like this: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/googlebot-spoofer/ The concept here is to be able to view your site as a googlebot sees it. However, the results are a little puzzling. Google is reading the text on my page but not the title tags according to the results. Are websites like this accurate OR does Google not read title tags and H1 tags anymore? Also on a slighly related note. I noticed the results show the navigation bar is being read first by google, is this bad and should the navigation bar be optimized for keywords as well? If it did, it would read a bit funny and the "humans" would be confused.
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Adding Google +1 To My Site
This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page. I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.
Technical SEO | | brentmitchell0